..Increased attribution of incentive salience to neutral or aversive stimuli might be associated with dysfunction of neuronal processing of positive and negative reinforcement and contribute to the formation of delusions in schizophrenia...

Switching schizophrenia patients from typical neuroleptics to olanzapine: effects on BOLD response during attention and working memory

..This prefrontal-limbic interaction has been shown to be modulated by serotonin (5-HTT) genotype, indicating a higher risk for major depressive disorder (MDD) with increasing number of 5-HTT low-expression alleles...

Childhood methylphenidate treatment of ADHD and response to affective stimuli

..Further prospective studies need to clarify direct and indirect mechanisms of MPH treatment that may contribute to emotional processing, which is dysfunctional in males without pharmacological treatment in childhood...

..These results might represent a correlate of altered emotional experience in schizophrenia patients who are known to report less positive and more negative affective states in daily life situations...

..In alcohol-dependent patients, brain atrophy and functional brain activation elicited by alcohol-associated stimuli may predict relapse. However, to date, the interaction between both factors has not been studied...

..Moreover, this study in a large sample of patients reveals a mechanism underlying prefrontal inefficiency and cognitive deficits in schizophrenia, thereby providing direct experimental evidence for the dysconnectivity hypothesis...

..We used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to assess the BOLD response in the ventral striatum of unmedicated schizophrenics during presentation of reward-indicating and loss-indicating stimuli...

Reward anticipation and outcomes in adult males with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder

..These findings suggest that male adults with ADHD show neural signs of abnormal reward processing. Future studies will have to investigate whether these dysfunctional patterns might be normalized by treatment...

..This may lead alcoholics to crave the pharmacological effects of alcohol to a greater extent than other conventional rewards. The present study investigated neural mechanisms underlying these phenomena...

..Our data provide a novel perspective on how alterations in presynaptic dopamine levels might be accompanied by a disruption of behavioral control as observed in aging or neuropsychiatric diseases such as schizophrenia and addiction. ..

The effects of life stress and neural learning signals on fluid intelligence

..Age-related decline in cognitive speed has been associated with prefrontal dopamine D1 receptor availability, but the contribution of presynaptic dopamine and noradrenaline innervation to age-related changes in cognition is unknown...

..Results indicate that comorbid anxiety symptoms have specific regional cerebral metabolic correlates in bipolar depression and cannot only be explained exclusively by the depressive state of the patients...

..BOLD responses to emotional expectancy were positively correlated with novelty-seeking scores in the medial prefrontal cortex. This correlation was strongest for the sub-dimension of exploratory excitability...

..Because we investigated postacute patients, orbitofrontal cortical alterations may be interpreted as a trait marker predisposing for development of catatonic syndrome in schizophrenic or affective psychosis...